San Francisco's Surveillance Cameras Have Horrific Frame Rates

from the just-commit-your-crime-quickly dept

There's plenty of reasonable concern over the increasing use of surveillance cameras -- but if you're going to install them, you'd think that you'd want cameras that were actually useful. Not so in San Francisco. As Engadget points out, the cameras in San Francisco have ridiculously bad frame rates, making them more like still cameras than video cameras. In some cases, there are 10 seconds between frames, meaning that the "footage" is often not particularly useful in solving crimes. San Francisco still insists that the cameras are useful for deterrent purposes. Somehow we doubt that it's a "feature" of these cameras to protect privacy by being horrifically bad. It does make you wonder, though, who makes security cameras that only take a photo every 10 seconds -- and, even more importantly, why would anyone buy such a security camera?

Could it be

Other Uses for Video Surveillance

"crummy" video cameras, as well as "good" ones do have roles to play other than deterring or detecting crime. Let's think "outside the box" for a minute, add to this list:
1. They can show traffic - is there none, normal, slow, stopped?
2. They can show nice views - one could imagine "electronic windows" that would stream feeds from video cameras from chosen spots around the world
3. They can verify the state of something -- I note that Google maps shows whether the umbrella on my back deck is open or closed -- in addition to traffic, could show firms open or closed, has parade started, is weather clear or cloudy, are lights still on; are kids still playing in the park; is babysitter still with them

Space some server space?

"But they acknowledged that most of the city's cameras achieve only 80 percent of the resolution they are capable of, and that they generate, at best, two to four frames per second because the city lacks the data storage space to accommodate more footage."
You'd think Sun, Google or even Apple would throw them a server or two...